


Protect Me From What I Want

by brodylover



Category: Supernatural
Genre: Alternate Universe, Alternate Universe - Genie/Djinn, Episode: s02e20 What Is and What Should Never Be
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2012-12-07
Updated: 2012-12-07
Packaged: 2017-11-20 12:56:44
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,286
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/585662
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/brodylover/pseuds/brodylover
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>We got to see the perfect world for Dean when he was touched by a Djinn. Now it's Sam's turn.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Protect Me From What I Want

Sam walked slowly, but he didn't want to walk at all. His hand tightly gripping the fiery ache in his side he forced himself forward. He couldn't stop. He had to keep going. He had to find Dean. Dean would know what to do. There was a line in his head and he kept repeating it, using it to drive himself forward. It was a simple line and soon it became a montra.  
"It doesn't matter how slowly you go, as long as you do not stop."  
The pressure that he was applying wasn't enough, his blood was still dripping from between his long fingers, soaking though both of his shirts and his jackets. He didn't know why he wore so much stuff. It was too hot. If he had the strength to he would have been stripping the layers off but in the back of his mind he remembered that overheating was a symptom of blood loss.   
Dean was ahead of him, lying face first on the cement. He wasn't moving. Sam's pace quickened, taking him to his brothers side. He was bleeding just as badly as Sam was, but he was alive. This shouldn't have been a tough job. They had come in for a few lowly vampires, separated from their nest but it seemed that was just a ruse. There was something else in the abandoned house and they weren't prepared for it.  
He felt a hand on his shoulder and he turned, fast, ready to take the thing on.   
There were spirals, nice blue spirals.

Sam woke up. He was drenched in sweat and the white sheets were stained from it. He moved slowly though, trying not to wake the sleeping blond beside him. It was a dream, it had to be. But it was so clear, so real.   
He looked back at the sleeping woman in his bed. Who was she? They were in a house, not a motel room and it smelled like a woman, perfume and fabric softener and fresh baked cookies. It smelled like his dorm room, actually, the one he had shared with Jess.   
He touched the woman's shoulder and she turned, her negligee slipping just enough for Sam's eyes to be drawn down to her small breasts.   
"Can't sleep?" Jess asked, her eyes foggy with sleep.  
"I…" Sam stuttered because this wasn't possible, it couldn't be. Jess was dead. Something was messing with his head. "I just had a bad dream is all."  
Her eyes went wide and she pulled herself up into a sitting position, "Another?"  
"Do I really have them that often?" he tried to cover his surprise. If this wasn't real he didn't mind.   
"A few times a week." She shrugged.  
"How can you stand it?" he leaned forward wrapping his large arms around her small body.   
"Well, till death do us part, you know?" she squeaked through the tight squeeze, "I kind of took it seriously."  
What, till death do us part? They were married? It was weird, she was dead, or was that just the dream? It was. She died in the dream and now he was awake. They were married. They had a daughter. Ruby was just a bit over four now. She was already acting like her daddy too, playing court with the other kids at preschool. Sam was a lawyer, criminal justice. He had a big case in the morning too.   
"I should try to go back to sleep." He yawned although he really didn't want to. It was around 3 in the morning, Ruby was dead asleep. He wanted to make love with Jess again; it felt like it had been ages since he'd seen her, "I can't mess up this case."  
"That's right." she agreed, "No more bad dreams?"  
"No more bad dreams."

The jury may have been full of idiots, but that was okay, the defense attorney was an idiot too. Sam knew he had done well, his side being completely in the know, and the jury would have to vote on his behalf.   
The dream was still bothering him, but just barely. As he walked down the steps to the courthouse, out to his silver Prius, he tried to remember all of the details. He and his brother had been hunters, traveling the country to kill demons. Jess was dead. Dad was dead. Sam had an addiction to demon blood. There were angels and demons and all sorts of monsters and they were trying to stop the apocalypse. Sure, he and Dean were hunters, but that life was behind him now. He was told not to come back when he left for college and he never had.   
How long had it been since he last talked to Dean, anyway? He pulled out his cell phone, it was sleeker and more technical than he remembered, and dialed a number. It wasn't a real number though; it was fake, one of the numbers from the dream. He tried again, this time getting through to Dean.  
"Hello?" the voice sounded forced, he was probably underneath some car.  
"Hey, Dean?"  
"Woah, you okay?"   
"What? Yeah, of course. Can I not call my brother?"  
"We haven't talked since your wedding. I thought the worst."  
"No, everything's fine. I just wanted to see how you were doing."  
"Oh, I'm fine. I'm working right now on a gorgeous 1972 Corvette and I'm taking Ben to a Def Lepperd show tomorrow."  
"Def Lepperd? Seriously?"  
"What? Those guys rock."  
"Sure."  
They went quiet. Sam didn't remember it being so difficult to talk to Dean.  
"Hey, I just got off of a really big case. You want to meet up when you're done with work? We could get some beers and talk."  
"Well, you can."  
"What do you mean?"  
"I don't drink anymore Sam. Six months of boring ass AA meetings. Lisa's idea, of course."  
"Good. That's really good. Well, you want to just hang out? Have the fams get together for dinner?"  
"Uh, sure. We should try, you know? Used to be we were a team, you and I."  
"I know. I'd like to try too. I'll talk to Jess about it and get back to you?"  
"Yeah, alright."  
He hung up. That was a lot less comfortable than he had expected and he wondered what would happen if he didn't call back. He didn't have to ask Jess, he could just pretend he had forgotten. 

"The guy from Adspace is on the phone." Jess looked over at him from the counter, the phone resting on her shoulder.  
"Thanks." He totally forgot that he was supposed to talk to them today. He took the phone from her and pressed his ear. "Hello? Uh, Sam Winchester speaking."  
"Hi." came an almost familiar voice through the phone. Something told Sam that the voice should be a lot rougher than it was, "You were hoping to advertise your firm, I believe? I have some estimates for you on billboards."  
"Oh, no, I wasn't thinking of billboards, I was thinking of something smaller at first, like newspapers?"  
"If you want, we could do that, but a lot of people are getting their news through the internet now. The ad wouldn't be seen much. You'd do much better with a billboard or a tv commercial."  
"I'm sorry, what was your name?"  
"Oh, my apologies. You can call me Jimmy."  
"Alright, Jimmy. We're a pretty small firm and we don't have any money yet, seriously, we're just starting up. Once we have a few ads in newspapers and things start moving I would be glad to get better advertising. I'll even go so far as to say that I would talk to you personally to get it taken care of."  
"Oh, uh thanks."  
"Listen, Jimmy, have we met? You sound really familiar."  
"I don't think so. I live over in Pontiac, Illinois. We don't travel much."  
"I see." He pulled out his laptop. Jimmy sounded so familiar, he knew that he knew him, he just didn't know how. He went to the company's website and checked their directory. There was a James, two Jims, and one Jimmy. He searched them all, just to be sure.   
As he searched, the almost known voice continued, talking about prices for ad space in Newspapers and the expected reach of the medium. Sam was only half listening as he stumbled upon the website of a church in Pontiac. There was a photo of the service, first communion, it seemed, and there was a familiar face in the center of it. He was in his mid thirties, handsome, dark haired and sharp jawed, and he was walking his blond daughter up the steps to the altar. Seeing him made Sam even more aware that they had met.  
"You know none of this is real, right?" Jimmy asked and Sam was pulled from his thoughts and from the photo. Once again he was reminded of the dream. None of this had felt real when he'd woken up and now he was having that feeling again.  
"Excuse me?"  
"These are just estimates. We won't know the actual cost until we've ironed everything out."  
"Oh, of course."

Dean had a fake smile plastered on his face as he opened the front door, looking at Sam and his little family. It had been a long time and it was Ruby's first time meeting her uncle. She stared openly, her jaw unhinged. Dean had a gnarly scar crawling from his neck to his eyes, one of many he had received fighting a Wendigo in Black Rock Ridge, Colorado.   
"It's not polite to stare." He told her and she closed her mouth and looked away.   
Sam followed Jess and Ruby into the house, smiling as warmly as he could at his disfigured brother and Lisa, who was extremely pregnant.   
"Looks like someone's been busy." He chuckled.  
"Yeah, well, you know your brother." She smiled, much happier than either of the men, "He likes to give himself more work than necessary."  
"You know that's not it." He bent down and kissed her.  
"I know, but that's not polite to say in front of company."  
They all stood awkwardly in the front entrance for a while until Sam instructed his daughter to ruin her cousin's life and the women excused themselves to the kitchen. Then it was just the two brothers left, shuffling their feet awkwardly.  
"How are you doing?" Sam finally asked.  
"Bored." Dean chuckled, "I don't hunt anymore and it's taking its toll. I have to go jogging now."  
"Jogging, work, a kid, another on the way, AA meetings, you think you have time to be bored?"  
"I just feel like I'm going through the motions is all."  
They moved from the entrance over to the family room, sitting opposite each other in the matching couch and chair, the coffee table between them. The table was covered in photos, safely protected by a sheet of glass. They were photos of an apple pie life, Lisa, Ben, and Dean having a real life. If Dean wasn't so scarred up and if his smile didn't look so faked it would seem like a dream.  
Dean leaned back into the couch, scratching at the three claw marks in his chest, just underneath his t-shirt. "Do you ever wonder about how things could have been if you did things just a little bit differently? Like if you had said yes to me all those years ago, when dad had gone missing, instead of no?"  
"Not really." Sam admitted.  
"I wonder if he'd still be alive."  
"He wouldn't." Sam was certain. The papers had said that John Winchester had died by asphyxiation, killed by a hospital janitor who was acting in self defense. They were sure that the janitor was actually a demon and the photos revealed that he had yellow eyes, so they didn't even have to think too hard on that. "He would have gotten himself killed some other way."  
"Probably." Dean thought, "I wonder about these things a lot. I mean, none of this seems real, it's too good. We were hunters, hunters don't get to live lives like this. They get killed by monsters, not old age. It's probably just me, but it feels like I'm living a dream, but it's someone else's. Like it's someone else's idea of what it would take for me to live a life like this, to be happy."  
Sam wanted to shout at him for saying such things. As he was saying them Sam starting feeling the same way. The feelings that this was a dream and that the nightmare he'd had the night before was reality returned. He didn't like it. This was his life. He was married to Jess and had a daughter and everything was good. Everything was perfect.   
If it wasn't real he didn't want to know about it. He wanted this life.  
The girls called them to dinner and they played happy families for a good long while. Dean and the kids drank soda pop while Sam and the wives drank wine and they told jokes and anecdotes about work. Jess felt Lisa as the baby kicked and they said that they were going to name it Cassidy if it was a boy, or Cas for short, and Joanna if it was a girl. They had pie for desert. The whole while Dean had a plastic smile on his somewhat chubby face but his eyes were distant, as if he needed to be somewhere else but he couldn't quite remember where it was.   
As they left Jess said that they'd have to do this again sometime, at their place, but they all knew that they wouldn't. They drove home in silence, Ruby sleeping in the back seat. Jess kept starting to say things, quietly, but none of it stuck. All Sam could think about was Dean's expression, how there were things he was supposed to be doing but he couldn't figure out what they were.  
They put Ruby to bed when they got home and made love in their own room, as quietly as possible. Sam enjoyed it but he wasn't entirely there. He kept thinking about what Dean had said; that this all felt too much like a dream. He was right, it was too perfect, too good, it couldn't be their lives.   
That night he dreamed of a psychic who liked his butt even though her eyes had been burnt out. She pulled Sam and his brother from their bodies so that they could save some reapers from a group of demons.

The next morning he was reading the newspaper with breakfast. Jess had already left, taking Ruby to preschool before she went off to the hospital. Somehow Sam had forgotten that she worked as a nurse there.   
There weren't many interesting stories in the paper, some cult loved author named Carver Edlund had died of alcohol poisoning, a businessman had gotten rich overnight after being seen kissing a black suited man, and some man had snapped and ate his family before being shot a few times by police, which only made him run off into the night. It was strange though, he felt as if he had a connection with all of those stories and that they hadn't ended the way that they were supposed to. Well, not the kissing one, but he could almost picture the black suited man perfectly in his mind. 

He headed to work, not thinking about much, just trying to catalog all of the information he would need for the trial in his head when a hand grabbed him. He looked down at the toothless, grimy man holding onto him, one eye glazed over with cataracts.   
"Wake up, Sammy, come on!" he pleading, shaking Sam by the shoulder, "You have to wake up!"  
Sam jerked out of his hold and rushed into the courthouse. What was it with people? And how did he know his name was Sam?

He sat in his designated spot in the courtroom, organizing his papers before him. The secretary walked up to him, a pot of coffee in her hand. As she poured some into his cup she stared at him from over her horn rimmed glasses.  
"Please, Sammy." She pleaded, "You can't leave me like this."  
He stared at her as she bustled off, pouring coffee for the defence attorney. 

"I…I was scared." The witness proclaimed from the stand, "He was there, with a gun and I… I didn't know what to do. I was a bit drunk, I'll admit, but that's no excuse… I grabbed one of the girls, Chelsea I think, and I ran. I just ran and ran. Sam you know this isn't real, right? I thought he was going to kill all of us."

Ruby shoved her Barbie into Sam's arms as soon as he had taken off his shoes. He needed a beer, but a headless doll would do.   
"Daddy, can you fix it?" she cried, "I was playing and brushing her hair and I pulled to hardy and it poppded off."  
"Yeah, I can fix it." He promised, sitting down at the table with it. He squeezed the head and it all went in weird different directions as he tried to force it onto the ball joint of the doll's neck.  
"If you don't wake up" Ruby said, leaning on the side of the table and looking up at her father, "you're going to die. I don't want you to die. I have to protect you. Come on, Sammy. It's my job."

He'd had three beers before dinner was ready and that wasn't good. He had slowed down on his drinking and his tolerance was down. Even the television was talking to him now, telling him that he needed to wake up. He wasn't sleeping though.

"Shut up!" Sam screamed, standing from his place in the courtroom. His outburst knocked his papers forward and they spilled from the table.   
Everyone stared at him.  
"Look, I am tired of your bullshit." He continued, "If this isn't real, I want to know right now."  
"Sam." The judge said, his head tilted to the side, "Are you not happy here?"  
"Happy? Oh God, yeah, I'm happy. But this isn't real. I keep hearing things."  
"I can get rid of those." The jury promised him their voices perfectly synchronized, "I can remove Dean and you'll never have to hear those dreadful interruptions again."  
"Dean?" he thought about it. Sammy. The voices had called him Sammy. Dean's the only one who can call him that. "What are you going to do?"  
"Well." His client shrugged, "I could send him into his own paradise, where mommy never died, but he's been there before. He'd catch on much too quickly. Easier to just kill him."  
"No! You leave him alone!"  
"Well, he won't leave us alone!" the secretary complained and she was still typing everything that was being said.   
"You're djinn, aren't you? Let me out. I want to wake up!"

Sam opened his eyes. He was thirsty. Dean was at his feet, looking worn out. He was covered in blood and reeling, close to passing out.  
"Dean?" Sam creaked.  
Dean's eyes lit up and he rose to his feet, shaking. Sam was strung up, an IV pumping into his arm. Dean smiled like an idiot.  
"You did it. You woke up."  
"Yeah, well. You were so noisy, I couldn't stay asleep."  
Dean cut him down and held onto him, draping one oversized arm over his shoulders. "Let's get out of here. We need pie and beer and sleep."  
"So no more AA?" Sam chuckled.  
"What? Oh God, you didn't imagine me with AA, did you?"


End file.
